XBMC has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a media player for hacked Xbox consoles. The software is now available in a variety of flavors, including versions for Windows, OS X, Linux, and even a bootable distro designed to run entirely off a thumb drive. For Christmas, a beta of the next release, 11.0, trickled onto the web, bringing a smattering of upgrades both large and small. Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

Version 11.0 will apparently work much better with remotes, and it's supposed to offer a measure of GPU-accelerated video decoding with AMD graphics hardware under Linux. Interestingly, this is ...